Jingus

My question is, why the hell were the police contacted only after the guy died, by "an elderly rights group"? That's at least neglectful if not downright obstructing justice for the nursing home to not contact the cops right away about an assault which put one of their patients in the hospital, let alone a possible murder days later.

Do you know something the rest of us don't?

Hell, the mere fact that they included that Sting/Bret match from Halloween Havoc makes me get all conspiracy theorizing about them trying to sabotage both those guysl legacies, considering how fucking awful that bout was.

It's not that different from Don "The Rock" Muraco, for example. If you want to start nitpicking some of the wrestling details, there's plenty of little mistakes here and there. -Like, what the hell was the Ram Jam, anyway? It looked like it could've been anything from an elbow drop to a diving headbutt, and we only really saw him hit it once. -Or, since when do guys trade thousands of dollars worth of steroids in the middle of the locker room? How would Randy have afforded all that shit, anyway? -Don't most wrestling bookers just write out the card on a piece of paper and tape it to the wall, rather than listing it all out loud in a pre-show pep talk? -Weren't all of Randy's matches awfully short, if you go back and timed them? -How would a fading 80s relic get booked in all the Northeastern smark federations, anyway? -How many guys who were in marquee matches at Wrestlemania III are still working the indies today? -And to me the most notable mistake was the crowd noise. In all of Ram's matches, it was just too hyper and loud. Felt like it never had any of those moments where the crowd sat down and shut up, which happens in pretty much every match ever. Maybe that just stuck out to me since I was an announcer and thus have actually listened to more crowds during more matches at more shows than most people would even want to think about. And there's probably more which I'm not remembering. But still, who cares? Practically every movie ever made has some kind of unrealistic moment or error of some kind which doesn't match up with real life. Stuff like Braveheart or Gladiator can take real-life historical figures and completely rewrite history in a totally fictional manner, and still win Academy Awards. So while there are lots of boo-boos you can point to, I think the stuff it got right (everything else) is more important.

Eh, depends on what kind of movies she likes. Do remember that this is from the same director who made Requiem for a Dream, and while this one isn't THAT grim or depressing, it's still not exactly a fluffy goodtimes popcorn flick. But if she enjoys kinda-tragic character study type of dramas with good acting and isn't the type of woman who'll get mad that you made her watch a movie which contains female nudity, then I say go for it.

A couple of things did jump out at me. First was when Steph said that she couldn't recall a single case of any WWE wrestler ever getting a concussion in the ring. Then literally two sentences later, she refers to Chris Nowinski as a guy who'd been forced out of the business by multiple concussions and then wrote a book about it. Kind of a Rick James "no I didn't rub my feet on Charlie Murphy's couch... yeah I rubbed my feet on his couch". The other thing was the steroid question. It's no surprise that Stephanie would wall up and completely deny any and all knowledge on the subject, for legal purposes she kinda has to. But it amused me for her to say she's never once ever even heard a secondhand conversation about steroid use, when one look at the overly chiseled torsos of both her father and her husband would tend to imply that Ms. Levesque is either a rotten liar or is the most naive and sheltered woman in the world.

It did remind me of few guys I've known. Anyone remember former WCW jobber/territory guy Bart Sawyer? He was a friend of mine, and he was definitely on my mind during parts of this movie. He lived in a trailer; he did hardcore garbage matches he didn't need to; he had a stroke which he's still trying to recover from and still wrestle even though he's totally not in proper medical condition. The Wrestler might not be a good representation of the most common post-Big Time experience, but there are definitely examples out there which are similar to the movie character.

What amount is that? I thought they were financially solvent now. Did they go back into the red?

I've never actually been so depressed and suicidal that I felt like watching something on the level of No Holds Barred, so I haven't actually seen it, just read the Wrestlecrap entry wherein Hansen mocking the genitalia of other men was the only time he was mentioned.

Heh, I remember that quote from Foley's first book, good catch there. Wasn't Hansen's only part in No Holds Barred some random cameo where he showed up in a bathroom to make fun of the villains' penis sizes? This is the kind of Memphis stuff I'd like to see more of. GREAT jobber name, right there. Did this make tape? Not expecting much considering the timeframe, but I still wanna see Ricky Morton and Toshiaka Kawada in the same ring. Yet he worked Takada in UWF just a few months after this. Can you imagine today's WON busting out Botchtista or Big Lazy in its pages?

I'm also on the "don't care how, I want it now" bandwagon. Don't care if the WON in question is from 21 years ago or 21 days ago, as long as you keep doing these writeups I'm happy.

They've done it countless times on commentary. JR has made some comments about various young divas being "too old" for the King on multiple occasions. One specific example I remember is from that WWE/ECW crossover show they did on a Wednesday night before ONS2, when Tazz made a crack or two about Lawler scouting out new girlfriends at the local high school. The only other person I can recall getting this kind of consistent mocking of their sexuality in snide asides is Pat Patterson, and, well, all those gay-bashing jokes Ross kept hitting on him did have that kernel of truth of course. I'm aware that just random throwaway mutterings on commentary don't represent any kind of evidence, but there's been more than enough hearsay on other fronts to at least make one suspicious. IIRC, Miss Kitty might've been underage when they first hooked up. And for what it's worth, I've heard a couple vague stories from a few old Memphis guys who talked about Lawler's preference for young meat. Nothing I'd care to repeat here since the sources weren't always credible and the tales ventured into libel territory, but the rumors of that sort of thing involving Jerry have been around for a long time.

Since when is vague rumor and hearsay not good enough to condemn a wrestler for being a bad person? You could also say there's an equal lack of proof of Triple H ever using bodybuilding hormones of any kind. Anyway, it's not like there haven't been stories about the King floating around out there. Lawler's ephebophilia (not the exact same thing as pedophilia, look it up) has become so widely acknowledged within the industry that they've repeatedly made jokes about it on national television. He's hardly the only person within the industry to have unusual sexual preferences of some kind or another, but the combination of the rape charges and his parade of much younger wives and girlfriends have certainly helped cement that reputation both backstage and online.

I might care if I didn't already have an old tape with no less than 5 Rockers-Brainbusters matches, recorded off the old MSG network and similar syndicated shows. But yeah, sometimes the WWE does make dumb little mistakes like that. For example, how many times has that damn Hollywood Blondes vs Steamboat/"Douglas" cage match shown up on WWE dvds? At least twice, which is a lot considering they don't ever repeat most of this stuff, while lots of the Blondes' far superior stuff remains locked in the vault.

My only real complaint is them wasting disc space with the stuff from the 2006 relaunch. Other than that, yeah, this looks like a damn fine compilation right here. There's a few little odds and ends I wish they would've included, but then you'd have to throw something else out, and the vast majority of the stuff listed does indeed deserve to be here.

It's been done many times, just never on a large scale consistently. Like you said, Chyna is obviously the primary example, and the fans were clearly willing and able to believe that she could kick men's asses. WWE is kinda sorta toying with this storyline now with Santino and Beth, since she's portrayed as being significantly tougher than him. Lots of indy shows do intergender matches on a fairly regular basis, with some chicks like Sara Del Ray, Lufisto, Cheerleader Melissa, and Mickie Knuckles seeming to spend half their careers against male opponents. (My personal favorite recently being Chuck Taylor vs Candice LeRae in PWG; in the middle of a forearm exchange, Chuck goes for the "two enemies of opposite gender suddenly stop fighting and passionately make out" spot, but LeRae shuts him down all like "No, dude... just no".) And I think you could certainly put someone like Awesome Kong in the ring with the guys without any of wrestling's "credibility" being jeopardized. But it probably won't happen anytime soon. Wrestling's still very much an old boys' club, and lots of them still refuse to even entertain the thought of letting a woman make them look weak. EDIT: despite all my femynist equality ranting, I'm still dead set against women blading. It's entirely an emotional thing, no logical basis, I just feel that the sight of a girl with blood running down her face is inherently wrong and nauseating. Hypocritical, I know, but there it is.

It all depends on the specific story you're telling. Like, a few years back, my indy fed ran an angle where I (the announcer) "won a date" with ODB. We did some goofy vignettes and stuff, and somehow it culminated in me having a mini-feud with Traci Brooks. Now, I'm not a small guy, six feet tall and a bit over two hundred pounds. But since my persona in the show was as that of the non-wrestler wimp, the crowd had no problem believing that Traci could kick my ass. (Admittedly, when we finally had our "big blowoff" match, I didn't technically hit her myself, I grabbed her arm on which she was doing the Orton cast gimmick and basically made her slap herself for the comeback. Thank my mom for programming me permanently incapable of actually hitting a woman, even in a worked situation.) It probably helped that the angle involved ODB, who was our babyface television champion and defended the belt against heel guys every week. Plus, when she was announced as my date-to-be, she picked me up, slung me over her shoulder, and carried me back to the locker room. That was a situation where the audience had been educated to believe that it was totally possible for a woman to be equal or superior to men in an athletic combat situation. These weren't sophisticates in the crowd, they were Tennessee trailer denizens, but they bought it. If you handle the details and the context correctly, you can make just about anything work in wrestling, even something which seems counterintuitive like a guy being heroic for hitting a girl half his size.

Oh, that's Randazzo's screen name? Okay, gotcha. Maybe I will get around to reading the damn book sometime.

Both. It's a punderful world.

Who is Polish Bob, and how have I never heard of this guy before? I dunno what his credentials are, but what he wrote does sounds like it has the ring of truth. Especially his characterization of Vince as a legitimately brilliant genius who just also happens to be a moody drug addict with an immature teenager's sense of humor. That explains so much. Where could more of Bob's rantings be found? Also, I vaguely recall something in that unauthorized ECW history book that Scott E. Williams wrote about Heyman cussing Stephanie to her face, so there's at least two sources for that particular rumor, for what it's worth. Oh yeah me too. Anyone got that?

Is that J.J. Dillinger? It looks like J.J. Dillinger. As a guy who spent five looong years working in various non-wrestling capacities on a million little shows that never hit the internet (save for my home fed USWO, who strangely always get their weekly results on Meltzer and OWW), I heartily endorse this product. There's a thousand charismatic, talented, and knowledgable indy wrestlers out there in flyover country, just waiting to be discovered; let us call them the Chuck Taylors of the world. Unfortunately, there are also ten thousand skinny backyard kids with no tights who rip of whatever spot they saw on whatever tape recently and don't know jack else, and twenty thousand aging pudgy guys with bad tights who have a basic grasp of psychology but are unable to do any maneuver more complicated than a dropkick. So, yeah, please do go ahead and trumpet the merits of any real talent.

Oh that's just awful. And hey look, Schneider's reading this at the same time as me, and probably for the same reason: the everpresent hope that Loss posts another one of these things. His writeups are strong enough to make us click the Most Recent New Post linky thing right there on the front page, not even waiting to click on the folder itself first. And when we get here, our hopes are dashed for a joke like this? My reaction is one half "great shame upon your family unto seven generations" and the American Dad line "Sixteen hours on a plane for a bad pun?! ...yes."

I have nothing substantial to add which was not already thoroughly addressed in the reams of material here. All I have to say is that Thomas K is my hero.

I would agree with that. These days, even the heels need to have something which makes them compelling characters whom you want to watch. What does Vickie have? She's just an ordinary person off the street, not much in the way of charisma or acting talent, zero ability to do anything in the ring. Why is she in this spot? I've heard this argument several times, but still don't buy it. Why does helping her support her family somehow translate into making her the top heel of the entire Smackdown brand, with more screentime than anyone else on the program? Vince couldn't have just given her a desk job, or better yet just paid her to stay home and raise Eddie's orphaned kids? Yeah, but it would at least solve one of the several problems, which is that Vickie can't really act. She may draw heat from the live crowds, just because her character is an emasculating bitch who speaks with a shrill voice, and naturally your average wrestling crowd will despise someone like that. But I'd bet casual viewers and channel-surfers at home are laughing at her, not with her, when her acting and line delivery is below average even by wrestling's standards. Yeah, Adamle was on the live show, they couldn't hide his flaws. Vickie gets off easier since they pretape the vast majority of her stuff. Admittedly, she didn't flub her lines as often as he did or seem quite so entirely braindead and clueless, but "not as bad as Adamle" isn't exactly a glowing recommendation.

Yes, but apparently the WWE disagrees, considering the sheer amount of camera time they've spent on non-wrestler general managers and commissioners over the past several years. Of course they should not put Vickie Guerrero in the ring, I never said that. My point is that if you're going to have someone who is effectively the top heel on your show, you might want the person in that position to be capable of taking a bump every now and then. How many of the others have been placed in her situation? A dastardly heel turn on the beloved Rey Rey, followed by what's felt like many many years of being pushed as the single top storyline on the brand. None of the other women in the company have gotten this shot. And once again, while she's over with the live crowds, she apparently has no ability to draw money, ratings, or anything which might actually help the company. I may hate watching John Cena, but I must (grudgingly) admit that he makes the company a shitload of bank. Why is Vickie there? What does she bring to the table? If you want a non-wrestler in this role, why not hire a professional actress who wouldn't look so wooden and unnatural in front of a camera? Yeah.